Abstract
I aim to explain why majority voting can be assumed to have an epistemic edge over lottery voting. This would provide support for majority voting as the appropriate decision mechanism for deliberative epistemic accounts of democracy. To argue my point, I first recall the usual arguments for majority voting: maximal decisiveness, fairness as anonymity, and minimal decisiveness. I then show how these arguments are over inclusive as they also support lottery voting. I then present a framework to measure accuracy so as to compare the two decision mechanisms. I go over four arguments for lottery voting and three arguments for majority voting that support their respective accuracy. Lottery voting is then shown to have, compared to majority voting, a decreased probability of discrimination. That is, I argue that with lottery voting it is less probable under conditions of normal politics that if the procedure selects X, X is reasonable. I then provide two case scenarios for each voting mechanism that illustrate my point.
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Notes
In their paper ‘Epistemic Democracy with Defensible Premisses’ (2010) Kai Spiekermann and Franz Dietrich defend some role for education and deliberation within the CJT approach. The two approaches are not incompatible.
This precise version of lottery voting has been recently defended by Saunders (2010a). I leave aside other forms of lottery voting, such as the one proposed by López-Guerra (2011). On his account, we randomly select some agents who then select by a vote the decision to be implemented. In my view, this is not a decision mechanism but rather an electoral system: we could still implement majority voting or lottery voting after the random selection of those who can vote.
I understand majority voting as including equal suffrage.
I take these terms from Besson (2005, pp. 245–253).
By political power, I mean a capacity to directly influence the issue of the decision-making process; this notion should be sufficient to express what is required by decisiveness for the purpose of this paper.
Cf. (Estlund 2008). I take the term from him but differ in my understanding of it.
Cf. Waldron (1999b, p. 114, p. 188).
Akhil Reed Amar defends a similar voting procedure but as an electoral system. He clearly tries to distance his approach from lottery as a decision mechanism when he claims that ‘lottery voting can’t work for deciding issues’ (Amar 1995, p. 202). We can also find a discussion of voting lottery in Robert Paul Wolff’s In Defense of Anarchism (1970, pp. 44–45 cited in Gaus 1996, p. 224).
This should be the case under conditions of reasonable disagreement.
Cf. also (Gaus 1996, pp. 218–219).
‘Underdeterminate’ disagreements do not warrant one and only solution: many solutions are equally compatible with what justice requires. ‘Inconclusive’ means there is only one solution compatible with justice but our arguments are unable to determine in a generally acceptable way what this solution is. See Gaus (1996, p. 153).
Other conditions may apply, such as ‘only disagreement which survived prolonged deliberation and information sharing can be properly reasonable’.
Gaus claims that a procedure must achieve decisions that fall ‘within the range of reasonable (i.e., inconclusive) opinions about what is publicly justified’ (Gaus 1996, p. 190). The argument is that lottery voting can be seen to be such a procedure.
See Saunders (2010a, p. 160) for a discussion of the fairness of lottery voting for permanent minorities.
‘To say that people are epistemic peers is to say that they are roughly equal with respect to intelligence, reasoning powers, background information, and so on’ (Goldman 2010, p. 189). This is a rather permissive definition which suits my own definition.
Rawls provides a canonical formulation of the ‘burdens of judgements’ (2005, pp. 54–58). I believe his approach can be extended with elements from the epistemology of disagreement.
As Goldman (2010) explains, some views can be objectively unreasonable but it could still be reasonable—the agents could be justified—in holding them.
Gaus holds a similar view when he claims that ‘it seems quite impossible to determine when reasons run out, and so we confront genuine indeterminacy’ (Gaus 1996, p. 225).
These two notions are important, since diversity forestalls the objection that the majority is defending its private interests and independence forestalls the idea that members of the majority are all taking their cues from an opinion leader. See Hershenov (2005, p. 227).
Cf. Wedgwood (2010).
Only a strong error theory would hold that agents are systematically mistaken. I think the onus of the demonstration is on those who would hold such a pessimistic view of our faculty of judgement (but then we might as well doubt their own faculty of judgement).
‘Can’ is important, since as Page says: ‘Too much diversity […] can produce catastrophe or inefficiency’ (Page 2011, p. 2).
The CJT holds that if independent agents whose competence is slightly better than random vote on a given pair-wise alternative, there is an increasing probability that they will arrive at the right answer the larger the group is. Cf. List and Goodin (2001).
I thank an anonymous referee for this precise formulation.
By this, I do not claim that my arguments for majority voting do not apply in cases involving proper epistemic peers. I simply acknowledge that further arguments are required to soundly ground the assumption that proper epistemic peers are facing inconclusiveness rather than underdetermination when they disagree.
This is a paraphrase of Estlund (2008, p. 3).
One should understand the ‘no chance’ here as a comparative assessment of the chances of issuing an unreasonable decision between majority voting and lottery voting when a limited number of agents are unreasonable.
My point is not about views that are obviously unreasonable. My point is rather about views present in a disagreement that are objectively unreasonable but which cannot be identified as such. Saunders’ argument (Saunders 2010a, pp. 171–173) in regard to extremist views doesn’t address such a possibility.
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Acknowledgments
I acknowledge the financial support of the Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture. I would like to thank Rowan Cruft, Aviva Shiller, Bryan Butterwick, the Editors of Res Publica and two anonymous reviewers, and the audiences at the University of Stirling and at the Brave New World Conference 2011, where previous versions of this paper were presented, for their helpful comments.
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Allard-Tremblay, Y. The Epistemic Edge of Majority Voting Over Lottery Voting. Res Publica 18, 207–223 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9176-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-011-9176-9